Items in Jul, 2002
Filters: Year: 2002 × Month: Jul × Sorted by date
Fun with the link tag
Things I learnt today part two: The <link> tag is fun. I’ve been building support for it in to IncDirectory (not long now)—it took a while to find the necessary background information but Mark Pilgrim, www-html, and the W3C gave me everything I needed.
[... 74 words]XHTML nested lists
Things I learnt today part one: Nested lists in XHTML are possible, but you can’t just put a list inside another list. You have to nest the nested list in a list item. References: W3Schools XHTML differences and the www-html mailing list.
[... 55 words]EyeDropper
Handy software tip courtesy of Tim (my colleague at Incutio). EyeDropper is a tiny shareware program for Windows which adds a magnifying glass to your mouse pointer, displaying the hex colour code of the pixel under your mouse pointer. The download is a measily 27KB and it saves having to print screen and load up a graphics package just to find a HTML colour code. When not in use it sits in your systray.
[... 77 words]“Erect me a great golden pyramid”
David Hyatt’s neo-cortical implant is holding out just fine.
[... 14 words]Pretty link on Kottke
In a discussion on css-discuss recently about underlines a on links, I pointed to kottke.org as an example of clever use of CSS for links where by the link underline is a slightly later colour than the link text. Today, Jason explains the technique and the thinking behind it.
[... 59 words]Blogchat rocks
I spent a while today over at Brent Ashley’s blog chatting away on BlogChat. BlogChat is Brent’s impressive DHTML chat system (backend in PHP, front end via JSRS) which allows anyone visiting his blog to talk to him (and other visitors) in real time, provided he is online to host the session. During the afternoon I got to talk to people from all over the world, all with similar interests because they all had the same taste in blogs. I am hoping to install a version of Brent’s system on this site in the not-too-distant future.
[... 108 words]Via Blogzilla...
A couple of Mozilla pieces, courtesty of Blogzilla. First up is the news that Dave Hyatt is leaving Netscape to work for Apple (Hixie mentioned this the other day). Blogzilla’s jeffp wonders if this could mean the beginning of iBrowser, considering Dave’s previous work on the Chimera browser which builds a Mac interface on top of Mozilla.
[... 143 words]Accessible fonts
Mark has out-done himself today with his long awaited coverage of relative font sizes. This is a notoriously tough topic (thanks to a whole bunch of strange CSS bugs and browser differences) but Mark carefully and comprehensively explains the various work arounds and CSS hacks needed to get the right effect with maximum accessibility.
[... 67 words]XML fun
Peter has upgraded his blog to the latest version of Moveable Type. As a result, his blog now pings weblogs.com via XML-RPC whenever he makes an update. blo.gs grabs the weblogs.com changes.xml file once an hour and uses it to generate a smaller file listing only sites on my blogroll. My site then grabs my personal favorites.xml file once an hour and uses it to render my blogroll ordered by the time each blog was updated.
[... 95 words]MySQL best practise
O’Reilly have a new article up entitled Ten MySQL Best Practises. Jeremy Zawodny has a few problems with the article, and Tony Bowden throws in some comments as well. There’s plenty of useful information distributed between the three viewpoints.
[... 48 words]Which power puff girl is your blog?
Oh wow. Which PowerPuff Girl is your blog?. I’m Blossom—yay! Thanks Mark-from-uni for the tip off :)
[... 21 words]Maybe splash screens have a purpose
I never thought I’d say this, but there is a place on this earth for web site splash screens and time wasting intro animations (now I’m feeling dirty). This comes after an interesting if slightly heated debate about the merits of splash screens over on the SitePoint Forums. I still can’t stand splash screens, but I can acknowledge that there are some web users who see the web primarily as an entertainment platform and have their surfing experience enhanced by a bit of glitzy animation along side their information. Thanks Bill Posters for helping me understand this bizzare side of the surfing demographic ;)
[... 111 words]Mozilla web author FAQ
The Mozilla Web Author FAQ answers questions on doctypes, broken stylesheets, image table gaps and javascript detection—the most common problems faced by web developers new to developing for Mozilla all on one handy, concise page.
[... 38 words]Less is more
The Minimalist Web Project is a collection of good looking web sites adhering to the minimalist style, based on the idea that “less is more”. Some beautiful sites are listed, including 37signals’ brand new CSS/XHTML design.
[... 38 words]An excellent rant
Lobowalk is a “somewhat daily” blog that has just made the transition to using CSS for layout. The decision to go CSS was accompanied by an excellent rant:
[... 168 words]Wiki fun
Yesterday I set up a Wiki for Smarty as well. I like Wikis. The WikiEngine used for Smarty and MACCAWS is called TaviWiki, and is implemented in PHP with a MySQL back end. I had previously deployed PhikiWiki for a couple of university projects, which is good in that it is the only PHP Wiki I know of that works from the file system, but bad in that it has no support for version tracking (essential if your Wiki is accessible to the public).
[... 95 words]Jonathan on longdesc
Jonathan has insider knowledge that Mark will not be covering the longdesc attribute in his accessibility series. This it not because longdesc is not a useful accessibility tool, but simply because it does not fit the “fire and forget” nature of Mark’s series. Jonathan’s post discusses longdesc and the difficulties involved in adequately describing an image.
Smarty at OSCON
Smarty at OSCON: Andrei Zmievski and Sterling Hughes will be presenting a tutorial titled “Template Architectures with Smarty” at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention in San Diego, July 22-26, 2002
. Further details are available here. Smarty is a powerful template engine for PHP which combines a highly versatile templating language with excellent performance gained through template compilation.
Blogroll etiquette
Jordon Cooper on Blogroll Etiquette. I haven’t made it on to many blog rolls yet but it’s always nice to spot a new site in my referrals. The problem with having a blogroll powered by blo.gs is that you can only blogroll blogs that ping either blo.gs or weblogs.com. I have actually gone as far as emailing several bloggers who’s blog I admire but am unable to link to due to their absence from these useful central repositories—the responses I’ve had have been positive so I’m hoping to add them again shortly.
[... 97 words]Blog birthday
This blog is one month old today :) According to my category statistics page I’ve posted 185 entries covering 23 different topics. Quite frankly, that statistic scares me...
[... 29 words]Busy day
Quiet blogging day today, but I’ve been busy behind the scenes. Firstly I’ve been playing around with TaviWiki (an excellent PHP Wiki engine), using it as a proof of concept for a Wiki-driven small website content management system. I’ve looked at several PHP Wiki’s in the past and TaviWiki is the best by far, with rock solid features and a well organised code base. My only criticism is that the script relies on globals a bit too much, making it quite hard to figure out what is going on at times. I’ve also been working on IncDirectory, the open source sequel to my aging links directory script ssLinks. Add to that a new CSS experiment and preliminary work on rewriting this blog to use mySQL and today has been my most productive in quite some time.
[... 155 words]DVB-HTML
New article on Evolt: DVB-HTML a new standard?. The article describes DVB-HTML, a new standard being developed to allow the next wave of digital televisions to access internet content. The good news is that DVB-HTML complies with the W3C’s XHTML modularisation requirement, and supports XHTML, CSS and the DOM. As I understand it, this means that if you author your pages in validated XHTML they will be ready for viewing on digital TVs. Web Standards at work.
[... 119 words]Bad faith my arse
This is ludicrous. NAF have ordered the transfer of the domain name canadian.biz to Molson beer, who hold a trademark on the word “Canadian” (a brand of beer):
[... 122 words]Lovely PNGs
Here’s a treat for anyone with a browser that supports alpha transparency in PNGs (Mozilla and IE5/Mac do, IE/Win doesn’t). Click on one of the little magnifying glasses under a thumbnail and the skin in question will pop up as a floating PNG, which you can drag around the screen. Admire the drop shadows, translucency and general prettyness and ask yourself why Microsoft haven’t implemented this X years after PNG became a standard. Hat tip to Boris Mann on thelist for the link.
[... 103 words]Image map accessibility
Mark Pilgrim continues to educate with day 24 of his series. Client side image maps need not pose a barrier to accessibility thanks to the helpful way in which alternative browsers use the alt attribute. They still aren’t much use for people using a normal (non-lynx) browser with images turned off though, and server side image maps are a big no.
[... 70 words]